Thick as Thieves

by Peter Spiegelman

  Bessemer yawns and rubs his eyes. “I might crash right here, Greg,” he says.

  “Not yet,” Carr says. “You think Prager’s going to be interested?”

  Bessemer smiles. “You’re asking me now? I thought you knew it all.”

  There’s a drinks tray on the credenza behind the desk, and Carr pours a gin and hands it to Bessemer. “You actually know the guy.”

  Bessemer sits up, and curiosity sparks in his bloodshot eyes. He sips at the gin. “Curt will be interested enough to talk. Why wouldn’t he be? I’ve referred clients to Isla Privada before, and even if he doesn’t take them on, he always talks. Talking’s free, he says. Besides, he’ll like the synergy.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning a client who can broaden his business model is better than a plain old client to him. Curt will like the idea of taking your money—assuming there’s enough of it—but he’ll like the diamonds even more. Someone who can take cash in exchange for diamonds, and who can do it in quantity—that’s going to appeal to him. Diamonds are a lot easier to move than cash. And if you tell him you’ve got a network of people around the world who can do the transaction in reverse—take in diamonds and pay out cash—well, that’s a new model.” Bessemer takes another drink and smiles at Carr. “Assuming your story is solid.”

  “It is.”

  “Because if it isn’t—if it’s not granite—”

  “It is, Howard.”

  “You’re confident,” Bessemer says, finishing his drink. “That’s good.”

  “You should be confident too. You should be thinking about what you want to do afterward, when you get your money back.”

  Bessemer sighs and looks at his empty glass. “I have been thinking about it.”

  “And?”

  Bessemer furrows his broad brow. “I don’t know. I’m skittish about making plans. Seems whenever I do, things never work out. Sometimes I think the best way for me to make sure that I don’t do something is for me to make a plan to do it.”

  Carr shakes his head. “Kind of self-defeating, isn’t it?”

  “Self-defeat’s my best thing.”

  “Maybe this is an opportunity to turn over a new leaf.”

  “That kind of plan is always the most disappointing.”

  “Then start small.”

  Bessemer nods slowly. “I could get myself cleaned up—lose some weight, ease up on this.” He holds up his glass. “Maybe try to get fit.”

  “All good ideas.”

  “Then maybe I could spend some time with my kid. He’s twelve now, and I haven’t seen him in … a long time.”

  “Baby steps, Howie. Baby steps.”

  Bessemer stretches out on the office sofa and dozes. He shifts around occasionally and murmurs words that Carr can’t make out. Asleep he looks younger, Carr thinks, and much like his son. Carr empties ashtrays and fills the dishwasher and makes himself another cup of coffee. He looks out the window, at a jet crossing the sky, and thinks about Tina, flying down to Santiago, and Guerrero, who may have been Declan’s pilot. He thinks about Declan, and his hastily sketched exit plan from Mendoza, and he remembers Valerie’s words on the wharf in Portland.

  You’re remembering a different guy, she said, and Carr knows she’s right. Sometimes it seems that he’s remembering several different guys. It’s like a hall of mirrors, and everywhere there’s a version of Declan—short, tall, skinny, fat …

  There’s the grinning red pirate who recruited him in Mexico; the wise mentor who taught him the ropes; and the tough, charismatic soldier who executed plans with precision and economy, improvised like Coltrane whenever things went sideways, and always led from the front.

  Then there’s the melancholy, whiskey-voiced raconteur, sitting in a darkened bar, spinning out tales of his days in the service—in Ireland, the Middle East, and at unnamed stops along the Silk Road—of the hell he raised with other crews, and the swag he hauled away. And there is the weary campaigner, aging, aching, and contemplating retirement with a mix of anticipation and dread. Those incarnations didn’t turn up often, and when they did it was always just before a job, or just after one.

  And then there’s the Declan Valerie had in mind—the erratic, reckless Declan, the willful, capricious one. It’s hard—impossible, really—for Carr to reconcile her version with those others, but he can’t say he hasn’t seen them before. He has, in bits and pieces, several times over the years. And especially toward the end.

  He hears Valerie’s voice again: There was César, and before that the Russians. They were the last jobs they worked, before Mendoza, and she was right about them—Declan hadn’t been at his best.

  César was a transporter, and he’d ship pretty much anything to anyplace, according to Mr. Boyce and Tina. He’d started out, like so many in the region, with drug shipments, and found natural synergies in the movement of small arms and cash. Then, in the early years of the new century, he diversified into transporting heavier weapons, hijacked electronics, pirated software and DVDs, and human traffic headed north. Despite his success, or perhaps because he kept so busy spending its fruits on hookers, Ferraris, and thoroughbred horses, César had, over the years, underinvested badly in his own security infrastructure.

  “I’ve seen 7-Elevens with tighter perimeters,” Tina had said.

  The perimeter she was talking about was in Puerto Barrios, Guatemala, around a waterfront compound where César kept an office, some odds and ends of his shipments—a pallet or two of flat-screen TVs, a crate of RPGs—a climate-controlled garage for some of his Testarossas, and $6.8 million in shrink-wrapped packs of hundred-dollar bills. The money was in a cinder-block annex to the Ferrari garage, and it should’ve been a simple job—three sleepy guards, a fence to scale, a video feed to interrupt, an alarm system barely worth the name, and a safe room that wasn’t. In and out, unseen and unheard, in seventeen minutes flat. It should’ve been simple, but it wasn’t, because Declan developed something of a mania for César.

  Not that that was difficult to do. César was unlikable in the extreme—a thug, a beater of women and children, a liar, a casual killer, and an all-around swine. Though he was, in truth, no worse than any of the other people they stole from, Declan had for some reason decided that he was.

  “I think it’s his girth, boys,” he confessed over beer one night in a Puerto Barrios bar. “He’s such a fat fuck, and he dresses like … What’s he dress like, Bobby?”

  “Like an L.A. pimp, Deke, circa 1977.”

  “Not even that well, lad. And he’s an insult to those cars of his. I just don’t know how he jams his guts behind the wheel.” It was a running joke through all their planning, and then, on the night of the job, in an instant it wasn’t.

  Carr was on the fence, and Declan, Bobby, and Ray-Ray had the safe room. Carr watched through the nightscope as Bobby and Ray-Ray came out, bags over shoulders, and headed toward him.

  “Where’s Deke?” Carr said into his headset.

  There was a pause, a whispered chuckle, and then Declan’s raspy voice. “Leavin’ a little something for that feckin’ sack,” he said, and Carr saw him in the doorway of the Ferrari garage—saw him pitch something in underhanded, and then come running.

  “Might want to add some quick, lads,” he said, and then the night lit up with an orange flash, a muffled blast, a symphony of breaking glass, and a shock wave that Carr felt even fifty yards away. He tore the nightscope from his head.

  “What the fuck?” Bobby and Ray-Ray shouted, nearly in unison.

  Declan was laughing when he reached them, and laughing later that night, when they passed a bottle around in the cabin of a sport fisher, halfway to Belize.

  “He didn’t deserve those cars, the fat shite. All I did was restore order to the universe. And what the fuck was he gonna do with that box of pineapples anyway? Nothing so productive, I’ll guarantee you.” He looked at Carr. “Why’re you being a feckin’ old woman about it, anyway? It’s fireworks is all—nothing to fr
et over. It’s like a tonic.”

  Bobby and Mike and Dennis and Ray-Ray had laughed with him; Carr and Valerie had not.

  Nobody was laughing after Nicaragua, though. The Russians were called Dudek, and they were actually from Ukraine—two cousins who cashed out of the army and headed west when the Evil Empire dissolved. And weapons were their specialty. They bought them, sold them, shipped them, serviced them, and trained clients in their use. And unlike César, they did not leave piles of money about in cinder-block sheds. They did, however, keep some petty cash on hand—$5.1 million, more or less—in a safe in the back office of Dudek Air Charter, not far from the Managua airport. The safe was a serious one, as was the security around it, which relied less on technology than it did on the presence of many guys with guns.

  Carr hadn’t liked the job at first, hadn’t seen a way of doing it that didn’t devolve into a full-on firefight, but Declan had pushed, and eventually he’d come up with a plan. It relied on distraction, misdirection, and some painfully tight timings, but if it played as written, it would get them in and out without a shot fired. Carr was pleased with it; Declan less so. It was late, and they were sitting in the shitty kitchen of a shitty house, in a city—Managua—full of shitty houses.

  “The way in is okay, I guess, but the exit is too clever by half. We’ll have the swag in hand, fer chrissakes, we don’t need yer feckin’ floor show. We just head for the door.”

  “And do what,” Carr had said, “shoot your way out? Those aren’t rent-a-cops at Dudek, those are mercs—mostly kid mercs. They’re not big on judgment or hesitation or worries about mortality—theirs or anyone else’s. You light it up with them, it’s not a halfway thing.”

  “I know who they are, boyo, and the last thing I need is a lecture on firefights. Not from you. I’m saying yer plan is riskier than it has to be because yer shy when it comes to heavy lifting—you always have been. You’re delicate, so to avoid the shootin’ you have us wastin’ time in that stairwell, while you sing and dance. Well, I say that’s a higher risk. I’d rather do the shootin’ than wait around fer someone to do it to me.”

  “I’m talking about a series of flash-bangs on the other side of the building, to draw them off. I’m talking about a wait of a minute, ninety seconds tops. We make some noise, and then you leave, and if you do meet people on the way out, you’ll meet fewer of them.”

  “So you say. But what’re you so worried about, boyo—you’ll be on the outside, out of harm’s way.”

  “There are risks we can minimize, and risks we can’t. The exit plan falls in the first category. If I’m worried about anything, it’s that you don’t see that. I’m talking about a minute, Deke, a minute and a half tops.”

  “You shy because they’re kids? Is that it?”

  They went back and forth like that, until the sky grew pale and everyone but Latin Mike agreed with Carr, and Mike stayed silent. Finally—peevishly—Declan folded. And then, three nights later, as he and Bobby and Mike were on their way out of the Dudek Air Charter building, he changed his mind.

  No one laughed after that. Not Bobby or Mike, who had taken a round through his right arm and who Carr had never seen so pale, and not Declan, who’d taken a round in his left thigh and killed three child soldiers along the way. The wound didn’t seem to bother Declan much on the drive west, from Managua to the Pacific coast, nor did it stop Carr.

  “We had a plan,” Carr said.

  Declan’s smile was thin and cold. “You know what they say about those, boyo: they don’t survive the first shot.”

  “We all agreed on it.”

  “And since when was this a feckin’ democracy?”

  Carr stared for a long while, and then shook his head. “What the fuck is the matter with you?” he whispered. Declan stopped smiling, but had no other answer.

  It’s nearly nightfall when Mike arrives, and there are clouds in the darkening sky, and approaching thunder. Mike has a six of Corona under one arm, and a bucket of fried chicken under the other.

  “Howie’s still sleeping,” Carr says, as he passes Mike in the doorway. “Don’t hit him again.” Mike starts to say something, but Carr keeps walking.

  Dennis is eating dinner when Carr arrives, a Cuban sandwich and a beer. He’s bent over a laptop, wearing headphones, and he doesn’t look up when Carr opens the door. Carr raps on the table, and Dennis starts and pulls the phones off.

  “I’m looking at the latest from Chun’s place—the wires Vee laid down.”

  Carr pulls a chair alongside Dennis’s. “And?” he asks.

  Dennis colors. “It’s good,” he says. “Actually, it’s great.”

  The image is clear, despite the low light: Amy Chun in her home office. The tiny camera is planted in a bookshelf behind her desk, and the view is over and above her right shoulder. She’s wearing a sleeveless white shirt, and there’s a mug of tea steaming in a corner of her desk, next to her cell phone. She is pushing aside the keyboard of her home computer and opening up the laptop she carries every day to and from her office suite at the Spanish River Bank and Trust Company.

  “Laptop keyboard is nice and clear,” Dennis says. “Vee did a good job with placement.”

  Chun takes a fingerprint scanner from the desk drawer and plugs it into the laptop. From her purse she takes something like a keychain fob, with a tiny LCD strip down the center—an automatic password generator. A log-on window opens on the laptop, and she types in a password, one part of it from memory, and the rest from the screen of the password generator. Another window comes up, and Chun presses her thumb onto the fingerprint scanner. The laptop screen flickers and then her cell phone chimes. Chun picks it up, listens, picks up the password generator again, and keys a code from its screen into her cell phone. The laptop screen flickers again and she’s into the network shared by the Spanish River Bank and Trust, and the rest of the banks owned by Isla Privada.

  Carr shakes his head. “We knew how all that worked, we could save ourselves a lot of trouble.”

  Dennis stiffens beside him. His tone is frosty. “It’s a virtual private network with multifactor authorization, including an out-of-band security feature, and I know exactly how it all works. What I’m missing is the checksum for Chun’s thumbprint, the algorithm her key fob is using to generate those one-time passwords, and the authentication chip inside her laptop. If I had all that, and Chun’s private password, and a phone on the network’s call-back list, then we wouldn’t need Vee in there at all, and I could log on to the Isla Privada network whenever I wanted. Give me Curtis Prager’s private password on top of that, and we could all go home right now. Now that would save us trouble.”

  Carr suppresses a laugh. “I stand corrected,” he says quietly. “We got Chun’s part, though, didn’t we?”

  “We got it,” Dennis says. “We got her password and we got account numbers.”

  “Nice job,” Carr says, and claps him on the shoulder. “What else is on the tape?”

  “Vee comes on,” Dennis says, blushing. He fast-forwards several minutes, and a shadow crosses Amy Chun’s desk. A moment later, Valerie’s—Jill’s—hip leans against Chun’s arm. She’s wearing a short white T-shirt and panties with lace trim, and she’s carrying a rocks glass. Carr can’t tell what’s in it, but he can hear the ice. Jill rests her arm on Chun’s back.

  “I’ll miss you,” Jill says.

  “It’s just a day,” Chun says, looking up at her. “New York and back. I’ll be home before eleven.”

  “You’ll call me?”

  “Why don’t you meet me here?” Chun says, and she slides her hand beneath Jill’s shirt.

  Jill inhales sharply and her hips shift. Her voice is choked. “Hurry and finish,” she says, and she exits the frame to the tinkle of ice.

  “Christ,” Dennis whispers.

  Carr lets out a deep breath. “Is that it?”

  Dennis blushes again. “There’s more … in the bedroom. The light is low, so the picture’s not great, and the
AC is blowing, so the sound is—”

  “Play it.”

  Dennis clicks on another video file, and a dim, sepia-shadowed image appears: a heap of pillows, a tangle of dark blankets, two pale blurs on a paler, rectangular field. There is the faint shifting of sheets, the sound of someone drinking, someone sighing.

  Amy Chun’s voice is a tentative whisper. “Have you been … out for a long time?”

  Valerie—Jill—laughs. Her voice is sleepy and soft. “I never thought about it that way; I never was really in. I’ve known how I felt since grade school, and I’ve never pretended anything different.”

  “Your parents?”

  “They were too busy fighting with each other to pay much attention to me. I was in college before they noticed.”

  “They didn’t care?”

  “If they did, I didn’t notice, and pretty soon I was out of there.”

  “My parents would notice,” Amy Chun whispers, “even from Vancouver. And they would care. So would my board of directors.”

  “It’s your life, Amy, not theirs. Your one-and-only life, and your happiness.”

  “Coming out is no guarantee of happiness.”

  “Nope—I know plenty of unhappy couples—of all persuasions. But not coming out—that is a guarantee.”

  Sheets rustle and someone exhales slowly. There’s a sound of ice in a glass. “I’m happy now,” Amy Chun says quietly. “Happier than I’ve been. Definitely happier than my parents are.”

  “They don’t get along?”